The Remarkable Properties of Greasepaint
by T0PH4T
Summary: Joker!Taylor. Natural Trigger. AU. Not *not* a crossover.
1. Expectations 0

Aristotle said that the key to good humor was expectation delivered on in a surprising way.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A girl walks into school. She goes to her locker, hopeful. Her expectations have been raised, courtesy of good behavior from her tormentors. She opens it up, finds the locker filled with blood and horror, then gets shoved in. Everyone laughs, nervously, but they do. The girl howls, screams, tries to escape, triggers, keeps trying to escape, then triggers again when no one helps her. Not exactly grade-A material, but what can you expect from high schoolers? Anyway, I don't like that story. Breaks my suspension of disbelief, requires a whole lot of things to go wrong, and it really falls off in the end. It's also more than a million words long, which is way too many for the punchline to be any good. Short and sweet is the key, right?

Here's another one. It's the same set up. Girl, high lowered expectations, locker. This time she punches her way out, takes a little nibble, then binges her way through half a dozen household appliances. Tens of thousand words later she kisses a different girl who had nothing to do with the joke, but that's alright because she did have something to do with the story. This one twists what you think you know, flips shit up down left right center and back, and it really doesn't care. This girl doesn't have anything to prove, and that's alright because the joke's not on anyone. It's just funny.

Anyway, the joke. One girl sees a cape. The cape hits her, then invites her _very best friend_ over to talk about seeing her. The _very best friend_ sees the girl, the girl sees her _very best friend_. The whole house of cards _the very best friend_ has set up comes tumbling down as she tries to explain the to girl the whys and hows, tries to use the cape's paradigm to justify just how fucked-up she is. The cape demands an answer, the _very best friend_ gives her one, and the girl dies.

Well, almost.

So. Humor. Expectation, unexpected fulfillment. Mess up either part and the joke falls flat, like an ice skater who fucks up a spin and throws his partner to the cold, or a clown without makeup, or sex without a condom.

See? See that? It wasn't funny. There was no lead up, just a dirty word thrown out, like pissing into the wind. Comedy's pyrotechnics, not lightning. It's an act, not improv. Hell, even the times it is improv there's hundreds of hours of practice behind it, free association and training on how to think and old references well-rehearsed and (if you're lucky) in-jokes that fall back into a well-worn rut of laughter. Call, response, like rallying in tennis but filled with social information that you can't just say straight-out, and it all has to seem like it comes off-the-cuff.

No wonder clowns drink.

(See? That one worked.)

What's our expectation? We have the _very best friend_, we have our cape, and we have our girl. We've got our Authority Figures, our Plucky Teenage Rebels, our Chaotic Evil Villains, our Big Bads, our Bigger Bads, and our Biggest Bad. There's an ensemble, a supporting cast, some more interesting than others, and a world on the brink. All that leads to patterns. The bad guys lose, the good guys win, and while something's lost, something's gained. It's a tale as old as time, and every time these caricatures show up everyone's ears perk up, good little doggies waiting for their treat.

Except that's not how the bad joke goes. We don't get a good guy, we don't get bad guys who matter, we don't even get comeuppance for half the wrongs, and the whole thing spins its gears until they damn wheels fall off. It's a bad joke because it shouldn't work, because it ignores half of the well-used tools that've been developed over the course of millennia, because the serpent stretches out for too long on too little, a tent of parchment-thin skin and tangled organs. Something lives in there, multiple somethings, but they're so lost in the rot that you have to laugh.

The good joke though, it's all in there. There's a bad guy who isn't so bad, a good person who really is that good, things lost which are worth losing, and the things gained are worth the hassle. It's a chandelier, it's a mosaic, it's a chuckle pure enough to shatter a wine glass, it's...

It's so clear it hurts to look at it sometimes.

The joke never loses itself to the pattern though. It goes through the motions because it makes sense, because the calendar inside measures out the right time, because its internal metronome naturally falls towards the most perfect tempo. It's not puppeteering, it's not acting out the scenes, it's acting straight-up. It feels natural, flows off-the-cuff, defines its own geometry, and never, _ever_ shatters the illusion of effortlessness.

We've got our bad joke, the one that doesn't go anywhere in a twisted attempt to bite its own tail. We've got our good joke, the one that checks all the boxes without only checking all the boxes. There's an expectation, tweaked a little by the specific props in play and the lack of stagetech. There's something right there, in your head, taking shape, and _that's_ the drawing board. I can twist it, paint it cherry red and neon green and chalk white, play off the levers everyone has that the patterns and jokes of old discovered by trial and error and observation, but it's still out of sight and Jackson Pollock was a hack.

That's the set-up. Two jokes, three girls of varying decency, and a whole fuckton of people in a jagged half-formed world. Expectations change as you name them, change as you acknowledge the acknowledgement, but that's there too, however fragile.

And all that's left is to execute.


	2. Run-Up 1

There were a couple key instincts you developed when you had to survive in the Docks.

The first was being able to smell danger. The college kids who volunteered at the shelters thought it was a metaphor, thought that Tim was joking when he said could tell if someone was trustworthy from a whiff of their stank from downwind. Dead serious. Bad drugs fucked you up inside while good ones lingered for a while, and if you sniffed hard enough the difference was obvious. Plus, the dealers who knew what they were doing also knew how to buy a goddamn stick of deodorant. BO meant that they were either too lazy to go to the drug store in nice clothes or just didn't care, both of which drove up the odds that the dealer didn't check their product before selling it. If Tim didn't like the smell of a guy, he didn't buy from them. That was just good sense.

Another trick was making a rock-solid map of the territory, stapling it to the inside of your skull, and updating it _constantly_. No one talked like drifters, and rumors of a change from the ABB to the Empire could be the difference between being getting kicked in the ribs and getting your throat cut. It was also developing because shortcuts opened and closed all the time, and knowing which ones lead where could save your skin. Maybe an alleyway was warm and dry enough to sleep in, with a dumpster right next to a soup kitchen that usually had something halfway edible, maybe it had become part of a nastier-than-normal pimp's strip. Brockton changed weekly, and the homeless who forgot that tended not to last long.

The final must-have know-how was when to to take a risk. A college kid had explained the fallacy to him, where people opened themselves up to the worst possible outcomes in hopes of losing nothing and closed themselves off from the best because they were afraid of losing everything. Quit while you were ahead, commit while you were behind, an always losing strategy. He said that it didn't matter whether you were risk-seeking or risk-adverse, whatever that meant, so long as you chose consistently.

Mind, the kid also assumed that people's fail states left them ahead, and he said it with a straight face.

Tim just smiled, took his bag of toiletries, and decided not to pop him in the mouth for telling someone with a gimp leg to go out on a limb.

The kid had been on to something though. Ever since that fateful day, Tim had started playing the odds. Nothing stupid, nothing that could get him killed, but he stuck his neck out, looked into the lower-yield and lower-population territory, slept in less-safe locations, and mostly wasn't punished for it. The exploration gave him new secrets, new pathways between sleeping places, and he started putting on weight. That, in turn, attracted more attention from other hungry eyes, and to keep them from eating him Tim took another risk: he started talking.

Information was currency. Safe sleeping spots could be used by a finite number of people, supply outstripped demand, and the price rose in blood. Good trash cans, if over-harvested, didn't feed anyone. Businesses were okay with one person using their bathroom, not okay with five. If you had a place for something, you kept your damn mouth shut about it except when the secret could cost you your life. Tim, however, had accidentally picked up more secrets than he knew what to do with, and found a customer base that had unlimited want.

At first, Tim traded secrets on a one-to-one basis. Then he asked for a little more when a lot of the 'secrets' started overlapping with one another, then he started getting discerning. The secrets changed from places to people to ideas to structures, his clients from fellow street bums to kids looking for a high to gang members to _capes_ to all of the above. With the diversification of capital came wealth, real wealth, and with wealth came permanent residence. Still not out of the Docks, still nothing that required a Social Security Number, but stable in a way that he didn't have before.

Tim never forgot just how good the grapevine was though, nor just how desperate a junkie could get for their next high. His back door was always open for people who had juicy gossip, and shit he was out-of-the-know on was a meal and a few bucks to anyone who made him in-the-know on it. Nine times out of ten the info was old, out of date, or useless, and Tim traded his time and a granola bar for jack shit, but that one time out of ten tended to really pay off.

After handing the ragged lady a small roll of bills and a bag of food, Tim closed the door and mulled over the news. Little girl climbs out of a sewer pipe ranting and raving, smacks around a pimp looking for girls, then sprints towards the nice part of town. It sounded like someone on a bad first trip, but bad first trips in the Docks were rare. New users were the minority by a _lot_, and the few that did come down for their hits tended to stay in the crack houses when they were high. It took a special sort of skill to not get mugged when wandering around high, and the dealers wanted repeat customers more than they wanted quick hits of cash. Something had gone fucky, and things that went fucky needed to be investigated.

Tim had two safes. The first one had a few thousand dollars in loose cash, some weed, and a small bag of heroin in it. That one hid under the sink, the first place to check in event of a break-in, big and heavy with an honest-to-god combination on the lock. More than one smash-and-grabber had been distracted by it for long enough to let Tim crack 'em on the back of the head with a pipe, and it was also impressive as hell.

The second one was a thin steel box, installed into a wall and hidden behind a bookshelf too heavy to move quickly or quietly. After spending ten minutes moving the damn thing out of the way, Tim hammered in a twelve-digit string of numbers, waited four heartbeats, and plugged in four more. The combination hissed, disarming the failsafes, and swung open.

Stacks of hundreds, bank-fresh, sat next to a trio of binders, two rolled-up maps, and no fewer than six cheapo phones. Tim grabbed the back-most one, replaced it with an identical model, then closed the safe and spent another ten minutes pushing the bookshelf back into place.

"Paranoid motherfucker," Tim muttered, flopping down on a second-hand couch that was more patch than original fabric, speed dialing the first and only number.

It picked up on the second ring.

"Whaddya want, cuntmunching sneakshit?" The voice on the other end was rough and high, undeniably masculine and harsh as sandpaper across Tim's balls.

"A little girl threw around a pair of toughs and sprinted out of the Docks. Pretty sure she's not a client, no idea about trajectory." Short and to the point, and as brutally honest as he could get. Skids didn't hold himself to the same standards he held Tim, but Skids was also the one paying Tim's retainer. That, and Tim liked Skids more than the Empire and Bad Boyz thugs who occasionally stopped by. For that alone Tim would've given Skids first crack at new info.

"Ass-bagging elephant dicks." The oath was practically solemn, and Tim could hear withered teeth chewing on cracked lips. "Get people looking for her, sneakshit."

The line cut out. Tim broke the phone in half, dug the SIM card and battery out, then broke the chip in half as well. Thinkers were a constant worry for any halfway competent spy ring, but a halfway competent spy ring also didn't get noticed by Thinkers if they could at all help it. They did that by passively gathering information through deniable sources that had no idea they were a part of anything and not making big moves.

Skids knew that. He also knew that asking after something specifically was about as big as you could get, and it was going to cost Tim people. That was a fact, straight-up.

Tim took a deep breath, then went to the fridge to get a beer.

Tomorrow, he'd be taking risks.


	3. Run-Up 2

When people thought of the Parahuman Response Team, they thought of the troopers. The ones that ran around in heavy armor and heavy weapons, who fought villainous parahumans, who risked their lives on a weekly basis in the mediocre action dramas Karrin liked to binge whenever construction work dried up and she had too much time on her hands. Mary bore the indignity and the jokes with a stoicism born of more than a decade of the married life, and in return Karrin restrained her inner handywoman to only the deck in the back, and then only on weekends.

Even with all that, they still had four swing benches for three people.

Karrin banished thoughts of her wife from her head and knocked three times on the worn wooden door in front of her while Jared adjusted his tie next to her. As police liaisons to the PRT went he was one of the more reasonable ones, for which she was grateful. A fifty year old that looked sixty, he was here in the off chance that Taylor Hebert turned out to not be a parahuman. Wards testimony generally constituted enough for a classification, but Probationary Wards testimony was not.

Officially, Jared was here to cover bases. Officially, he didn't know anything about the politics of the PRT or Protectorate. Officially everyone was on the same side, and any watchwolfing was the jurisdiction of each branch's respective Internal Affairs offices.

Unofficially, Jared had offered her a fast track to detective if she wanted to whistleblow on anything. She'd told him to keep the door open.

A tall, thin man opened the door. His hair had started to go, with large green eyes that dwarfed the glasses in front of them. Even though he must have had six inches and twenty pounds on her there was a wispiness to him, like a fire just about to go out. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and his free hand was braced against the door frame, fingers tensed with anticipation.

"Do you have news about Taylor?" he blurted out.

Karrin nodded once. This was going to be rough. "May we come in, Mr. Hebert?"

"Of course, of course," he said, stepping aside and motioning into his house with one hand. As she and Jared step through a small coat room, Karrin took in the little details. She'd worked with more domestic abuse-related triggers than she cared to remember, and filing a missing persons report for his daughter in no way disqualified him from being the cause.

What she saw was a simple, if sparsely-furnished, living room, with a tiled kitchen on one side. A few dirty plates sat in the sink, which was still running, and as her eyes flicked over it Mr. Hebert walked over and shut the water off.

"Sorry, I was just trying to keep busy," he said, drying his hands quickly and motioning to the dining table. "Can I get you anything? Coffee, water?"

"I'd take a cup of joe," Jared said, slowly sitting down on one side of the table. Karrin nodded in assent, taking the seat to the left of him. Once the drinks were in hand, Karrin started talking.

"How much do you know about Taylor's school life?" she asked, drumming her fingers on the nearly uncomfortably hot mug.

Mr. Hebert shook his head. "I know she's being bullied. Is it something worse?" He paused, staring into his coffee, then looked up. "Is it a gang?"

"Not yet," Jared answered carefully, holding his mug under his nose. This one had some chipping around the rim, and when he went to take a sip Karrin winced in anticipation of a cut lip. "We have reason to suspect your daughter is holding a grudge against a parahuman."

Mr. Hebert stared at Jared blankly. "What?"

Karrin explained the situation as best she could. How a Ward, in their civilian identity, caught Taylor spying on them changing out of costume. She explained how Taylor had fled the scene without hurting anyone, evaded the Ward's pursuit, and how the police were currently in the process of transferring the investigation over to the PRT. Jared gave Mr. Hebert the statistics about runaways and missing persons, then Karrin the potential legal and social issues of what Taylor could know.

For a long time, the table was silent.

"As bad as things are, no one's been hurt," Karrin said quietly. "Odds are she'll come back home at least once, and there's precedence for her situation. Talk to her, explain that we can work things out, and everything will turn out alright."

Mr. Hebert nodded, not really looking at either of them. "Thank you for your time, officers."

Karrin and Jared took the hint and departed, a pair of business cards left behind just in case things went well when he tried to talk down his daughter.

About halfway back to the station, Jared asked, "Do you think he had anything to do with it?"

Karrin shook her head. "He was afraid for her, not of her. I didn't see any rage that was out of line with a parent learning their kid had been bullied, and while he could be faking it I'm usually pretty good at spotting when someone's putting on an act. What do you think?"

A few raindrops smacked into the windshield. Not enough to start the wipers, but Jared rolled up his window anyway. "I think a girl decided to run away from a Ward, and that deserves a think."


End file.
